Chapter 146——Sowing Wild Oats
A little time spent in sowing your wild oats, dear young friends,
will produce a crop that will embitter your whole life; an hour of
thoughtlessness—once yielding to temptation—may turn the whole
current of your life in the wrong direction. You can have but one youth;
make that useful. When once you have passed over the ground, you
can never return to rectify your mistakes. He who refuses to connect
with God, and puts himself in the way of temptation, will surely fall.
God is testing every youth. Many have excused their carelessness
and irreverence, because of the wrong example given them by more
experienced professors. But this should not deter any from right-doing.
In the day of final accounts you will plead no such excuses as you
plead now. You will be justly condemned, because you knew the way,
but did not choose to walk in it.
Temptation
Satan, that arch-deceiver, transforms himself into an angel of light,
and comes to the youth with his specious temptations, and succeeds
in winning them, step by step, from the path of duty. He is described
as an accuser, a deceiver, a liar, a tormentor, and a murderer. “He that
committeth sin is of the devil.” Every transgression brings the soul into
condemnation, and provokes the divine displeasure. The thoughts of
the heart are discerned of God. When impure thoughts are cherished,
[430]
they need not be expressed by word or act to consummate the sin and
bring the soul into condemnation. Its purity is defiled, and the tempter
has triumphed.
Every man is tempted when he is drawn away of his own lusts and
enticed. He is turned away from the course of virtue and real good by
following his own inclinations. If the youth possessed moral integrity,
the strongest temptations might be presented in vain. It is Satan’s act
to tempt you, but your own act to yield. It is not in the power of all the
372